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The COVID-19 pandemic has had untold impacts on our shared work of teaching and formation. For those whose institutions have continued in-person instruction, no matter the degree of precaution taken, the risks of transmission have added fear, stress, and uncertainty to teaching contexts that already include significant challenges (which I need not enumerate here). Our challenging circumstances have also provided unique opportunities, though. And many have responded with admirable flexibility and resiliency. I have heard inspiring stories from friends and colleagues who have been able to facilitate safe learning and are sometimes even thriving, within the constraints and possibilities of our specific situations. I always have butterflies when a new school year begins, but in August of 2020 I felt paralyzed. How could I ensure that I was doing everything I could to keep my students safe while also facilitating the possibility of learning and growth within the unique stressors of the moment? I decided that, as long as I could ensure accessibility, all of my classes would meet outside, weather-permitting, as often as possible. In this first blog (of three), I will introduce the practice of outdoor teaching and reflect on its significance for theological education in our current circumstances. Two subsequent blogs will explore significant experiences and takeaways from my own outdoor instruction since August of 2020.[1] As I noted above, my fundamental motivation for outdoor teaching was to ensure a safe learning space. To be sure, walls and a ceiling offer safety and protection from the elements. When indoor spaces become places of more significant risk, though, we can experience what is normally protective as oppressive. The masks and distancing required for safety in enclosed spaces also raised literal barriers to communication and to nurturing the sense of community which I strive to facilitate for my students. Meeting outdoors allowed us all to breathe more freely, and in turn, to communicate and cultivate community more intentionally and with greater effect than would have been possible behind masks, socially distanced, and wary of the threat of a pathogen spread much more easily in enclosed spaces. Outdoor education has a long and storied history. While it has not always been adequately inclusive in western contexts, indigenous peoples have long emphasized the importance of learning within, and from, places of inhabitance. Our current climate crises demand that educators in theology and religious studies intentionally practice and foster connections with our more-than-human natural world for the sake of its well-being and for the sake of our own survival. Such intentionality is a matter of spiritual, religious, and moral concern for me as a Christian theologian. Though I have yet to teach a course directly on issues of creation care, teaching outside has already provided me with countless opportunities to connect my students to the natural world. Aside from providing an occasion to help meet the exigencies of responsible stewardship and living justly in creation, I have found that outdoor teaching is profoundly humane. Our built environments have the potential to make us forgetful of our dependence, contingency, and even capacities for embodied learning. However, as Jennifer Ayres writes, “When learners are invited outside the four-walled classroom, . . . their sensory experience of nature, particularly when paired with caring mentors who can accompany the learners as they make sense of their experience, can be transformative.”[2] When we resumed face-to-face instruction in the fall of 2020, I told my students that I suspected that our shared work together during the 2020-2021 school year would likely make for the most challenging and most poignant year of their educational journey. It was certainly the most difficult and most transformative school year yet for me. Teaching outdoors has provided me countless opportunities to reassess and improve my abilities to empower and instruct my students, to discover and promote cross-curricular and intellectual, moral, and practical connections, to appreciate the privilege of the work that I am able to do, and to marvel at and encourage the courage, attentiveness, resiliency, and creativity of my students. Though the uncertainty of the pandemic continues—I write these words just days after the discovery of the Omicron variant—because of the countless benefits both I and my students have experienced in classrooms without walls, I cannot imagine going back inside again full-time. I will be relieved if and when we are all able to breathe, speak, and listen more freely indoors, but all of my future teaching will include the fresh air of my classroom without walls. [1] I am grateful for the opportunity to share what I have learned in the hopes that others might benefit. That said, I must acknowledge that the privileges of my embodiment (as a cisgender white male) and my institutional circumstances (a campus with infrastructure amenable to outdoor instruction) mean that what I have been able to do may not be possible for others. Even so, the experience of meeting outside has reminded me of things I had forgotten and taught me new things about pedagogy that are worthy of consideration, even for those unable to teach outside. [2] Jennifer R. Ayres, Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019), 76.

Talking about race in the classroom makes me nervous. What if a white student says something awful and I don’t know how to handle it? What if I don’t know the facts? What if something blows up and I end up in big trouble? And isn’t it irresponsible of me to teach something I don’t know enough about? Since race is so charged and complex, it’s tempting to leave it to experts. But I’m teaching at a small and predominantly white Catholic college in the Northeast (I’m white myself), and I largely teach gen ed to first-year students. We regularly teach outside our areas of expertise. And since very few of us specialize in race, our students won’t learn anything about it if non-experts avoid the topic. That seems unacceptable, so I’m teaching race even though I’m uneasy. After all, fear isn’t always a good reason to avoid something. I tell my students that all the time. I also believe that my fears are out of touch with reality. Of course, awful outcomes are possible. But they aren’t likely. I’m a good listener, I’m tenured, and my students are decent human beings who try to be kind, considerate, and non-racist. And I don’t have to stay ignorant: I can read, listen, and practice. Since I started engaging the topic of race in my classes,  I’ve improved. I know the subject better, I can sometimes anticipate what students will say and how and if to respond, and I’m better at managing the conversation. Most importantly, I’ve figured out how to create a reasonably safe classroom in which to have these conversations: We don’t start with race. Many of my first-year gen ed students have a hard time speaking in front of the class. They need to practice speaking and they need to trust me and each other before we tackle more controversial topics. My syllabus says that I’m still learning and that I expect to learn from my students, and I tell them that repeatedly. They don’t believe me, so I demonstrate it. I mess up and thank them when they correct me. I ask them to explain things I don’t know, and we build on those explanations whenever possible. When they tell me something cool, I write it down. I show them that I’m still engaged in the messy process of learning and that I’m willing to learn from them. We establish guidelines for discussions early on, and we revisit them before we embark on trickier topics, like race. I mention my discomfort and let them confess theirs, and then we talk about why it might be important to talk about difficult subjects anyway. I give them several ways of providing feedback and to ask questions, and I make some of them anonymous. I request feedback, especially if I suspect there’s a problem. If I don’t know how to handle something, I ask them (and others) for ideas. When I screw up, I apologize and try again. I learn and I grow. Through it all, I keep a nervous eye on my students of color. I might be worrying too much about the impact of these conversations on them. It’s uncomfortable for some of them, and of course I want to minimize their suffering. But my fears tell me that they could break. And that seems unlikely. They have almost certainly heard much worse. Still, students of color are badly outnumbered in my classroom, and while some of them are fine talking to a room full of white people about race, others aren’t. I email them beforehand and give them options: Let me know if it gets too uncomfortable. It’s OK if you don’t want to say anything – and it’s OK if you want to talk a lot too. Some say they’re fine, and some don’t answer. But some acknowledge that it will be difficult, and then we come up with ways of making it a little easier. Some of them end up talking a lot, others stay quiet in class but write to me, and others yet stay entirely silent. I make space for those who want to speak and then get out of the way as much as possible. In the spring, one of my quiet black first-years wrote a paper about our classroom discussion of race. She criticized my talking about discomfort, arguing that white people’s fears about discussing race express white fragility and that we need to get over it. She made a good case. So I’m trying to get over it and I’m reflecting on how to incorporate her insights into my course. Both the course and the getting over it are works in progress. Baby steps. *Read the first blog of this series here. **Watch for the third blog in this series in January.

CREATIVITY IS… Learning in the theological academy needs to be liberated. It has been held hostage by standards of appropriateness authored by voices and ideologies long gone yet holding on. They can be quite static and unmoving. The solution? Creativity. But I’m not sure if theological institutions are truly ready for her, for she asks for too much. Within theological education, Creativity needs honesty. She requires both desire and attention to possibility as well as a sense of duty to hold failed systems of current practices accountable. She is bold and voluminous; veracious enough to name when she does not have the appropriate room to thrive. She will, without hesitation, mention how crowded institutional elephants can make a room (no offense to elephants, they are simply not spatially conducive to a healthy theological education environment). Creativity does not hold her tongue, for limit might deter her potential. She announces how holding on to ill-fitting things and anachronistic ideas takes space away from her truest emergence. And theological education is, unfortunately, a space unaware of its spatial misappropriations. Colonial roots can do that to you. Well, what can faculty do to welcome her into their classrooms? “Faculty in theological education,” Creativity would say without pause, “are captives to the institutionality of teaching.” That’s not the answer we were expecting. “I can’t work well, here,” she would continue. “Here, I need the opposite, a spirit of the apophatic. I can tell you where something is by naming where it is not, how it is by how it is not. Here, I need partners who understand the beauty of this refusal—of crafting the necessary in the midst of a mantle of negation. I need dreamers willing to be anti-institutional within their institutions. This clash, of refining through refusing, is where I am.” We can ask her for elaboration: “What does it mean to be anti-institution?” “It means to be me,” she will answer with nonchalance. “But how can an anti-institution institution exist?” we will surely press. “Have you checked the margins?” she will rhetorically inquire.   ANTI-INSTITUTIONAL Check the margins. What will you find? Who will you find? Those who have historically been made the least of these. By virtue of their existence, many know Creativity and her bold requirements quite personally. To be creative in the theological academy means to actively resist the lure of traditional institutional priorities: maintaining the status quo financially and otherwise, re-enforcing institutional standards of rigor and knowledge, and continuing in the practice of institutional “speech-acts,” as Sarah Ahmed brilliantly calls them, where institutions claim their worded hopes of inclusion, diversity, and innovation as actual truth, though the world is aware they are not.[1] Creativity is naming where God is by illumining where God is not; remember, an apophatic spirit. To be sure, Creativity can exist within institutions; she has for years, but has she existed well? Freely? Is she permanent dweller or occasional guest? Is it possible, let alone desired, to make her host instead of hosted? To give her full reign of an institution? No. She is too risky. Total creative power would mean granting room for the ways of being and knowing that have always been in the room but have only known suppression. It would mean granting those who have been forced to make the margins their homes shared space in the center. And no one with institutional influence and say is interested in giving up the center. Creativity considers the historical pawns the priority instead of laborers towards the bottom line. The bottom line of budgets are amenable foes but not the only ones. The bottom line of certain standards of academic rigor, the bottom line of grades as the only means of intellectual analysis, the bottom line of fortifying academic structures created for the white men for whom theological education was created. Creativity wants—no, needs—not only the space of the classroom to leave a deep impression, but say over the entire structure of the theological educational system. Unprepared to acquiesce to such a demand, institutional heads will ask if it’s OK if she appears in the individual efforts of underpaid doctoral students, job-insecure adjunct educators, and exhausted minoritized faculty persons. She will reluctantly agree, or more like make do, but never stop asking in a nonchalant, rhetorical, inquiring tone, “Have you checked the margins?” There is a message in the margins: the classroom could be a space of influence—influence not synonymized as power, but a space where relationships between students and teachers, different forms of knowledge, and measures of intelligence can be reimagined. It can be a space where students’ experiences are taken seriously and where teachers do not have to take themselves so seriously. “Have you checked the margins?” How can the classroom become a platform for the periphery? What must be undone so that there is room for better? Many theological institutions still believe they must keep academic tradition for a church traditionally understood; Creativity instead asks, “What happens if minoritized students were the center in the classroom and institution as a whole? Do institutions want to learn their students? Do they trust marginalized experiences to be a true expression of the church universal?” “Have you checked the margins?” then is another way of asking, “Have you asked yourself?” [1] Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism,” Meridians 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126, especially 104.

A college friend of mine took his life by suicide when he was only twenty-two years old. The death occurred just weeks before I began seminary in 1987. Theological study offered me a refuge in which to grieve Bill’s death and to try to make sense of it. I wrote papers and talked with friends. I had dreams that allowed my psyche to release the burden of guilt and responsibility. Questions asked with intensity have lingered for years. Why could I not have stopped him from making this choice? Why did he do it? Recently, as I completed a book on embodied spiritual care, I realized that theological questions which try to make sense of suffering have over time opened a deeper awareness of the need to listen to and tend to our own bodies. Such engaged listening practice allows us “to keep on keeping on” when we cannot make sense. It also attunes us to our own pain and the pain of others. I teach listening skills in online and face-to-face classes. When I have modeled listening in the physical classroom, course participants always mention how little I speak. Given the chance, some of them would want to fill in what feels like a vacuum. Pastoral caring and spiritual listening requires attentive presence that leaves space for people to express themselves, to hear their own voices, and to sense God in the story. We also need to learn how to listen to our own bodies. During those role-plays, I pay keen attention to my body by noticing feelings and thoughts, whether and where anxiety is being experienced, and images that come to mind. The debriefing of a role-play in the classroom becomes an occasion for teaching how to pay attention to and make use of one’s own internal process. I draw on my body story and experience to teach others how to pay attention to their own. Over the years, I have used different strategies for teaching embodied spiritual practices. In a course on the spirituality of pastoral care and counseling, I once invited participants to engage in slow meditative walking within the courtyard at my school. Zen Buddhists call this practice of listening with the body kinhin, which means sutra walk. The students willingly gave it a try, but I quickly realized my own self-consciousness around exposing the class to the watchful eyes of staff and onlookers. I have since learned the value of teaching from a place of vulnerability and giving students the choice of how they want to participate. Experience in pastoral ministry informs my sense that listening to our bodies matters for the ability to care with others. Cultivating practices such as yoga, qigong, focused breathing, body scanning, and labyrinth walking, among many other possibilities, helps to access and release frustration, stress, sadness, and anger held in the body. The practices also help us to tap into delight, hope, and joy. Tending our own body story opens listening possibilities for receiving the whole of another person’s or a community’s story and experience. Pastoral ministry calls for such listening. Seminary classes and instructors have a role in curating experiential learning to undergird it. Online asynchronous classes offer valuable opportunities for embodied listening. In the privacy of a secure learning space without anyone watching, students may engage practices that help them tune in to their own body story and experience. On a cautionary note, I urge participants not to engage or to halt a practice if a traumatic response is hooked. This component of the class is completion graded. Full credit is given for briefly describing how or why a practice may or may not be beneficial. My observation is that experiential learning carries transformative power as students give themselves to the process. While I have fully expected some students to go through the motions on the exercises, I have been quite moved at the personal and theological insights most participants share. Some note working through reluctance or resistance to a practice only to find themselves surprised by what opens for them. Some dislike or do not connect to a particular practice and share their honest reactions. Others rediscover a practice that once sustained them. These are profound and not perfunctory reflections. I revel in reading them. Pastoral ministry calls leaders to embodied listening that is genuine and real in their encounters with others and the Holy. This teaching method facilitates listening to ourselves, to our bodies, as a base for that vital practice.